Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie (e book reader .TXT) 📕

the free sprit in all of us, even if we couldn’t express it or we lacked the opportunity to so indulge. Many of us would like to symbolically dig under that fence in our backyard to see if there’s something out there we’ve been missing. Most of us never do it. Maybe some of you would like to run away with the UPS driver. That’s none of my business.

Barney would bust loose from the leash during a walk, or sneak out through an unsecured door during a TV shoot. Twice at traffic lights he leapt through the open backseat window and bolted down the street. I’d chase him in the car, but then he’d veer off behind some houses and I would have to park the car and chase him on foot. Eventually, he’d be so taken by a scent that I could creep up behind him while his nose was buried in a hole or a bush. This was a game for Barney. He was good at it. I always hoped it was true that dogs aged seven times faster than humans, because it seemed like he was getting harder and harder to catch.

Barney never came back on his own. Usually someone would find him and call. Those conversations reminded me of the great O. Henry short story, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in which a couple of miscreants kidnapped an eight-year-old human bundle of aggravation, only to find that he was more trouble than any ransom was worth.

I always used a very scientific approach when looking for Barney. I would drive my car to each street corner, open up my window, and shout his name as loud as I could. To call this form of search useless would be giving the plan too much credit. In all his years, he never came when I called him. Never. I always found him. He always knew I would. That was the problem.

I’d scour the neighborhood with an eye toward open garbage pails or garages stocked with food supplies. Sometimes Barney would run off into the woods, but when he realized that most food in the woods is still alive and required some form of pursuit, his interest in the forest waned. But Barney knew every Weber grill in the neighborhood.

As I had done so many times, I’d retreat to the house without my sidekick—frustrated, empty-leashed, playing out in my mind what I would do if Barney was truly lost. Or worse, hit by a car. What would I tell the viewers? What would I tell my boss? I knew Brett would be able to deal with Barney’s demise. Sure, he would have felt badly for me—he knew how much I loved Barney—but there was no question that a five-old-year old only child was going to find some satisfaction being top dog once again.

Sometimes when I would get home after an early evening meeting, Mary Ellen would meet me at the door. “He’s at 34th and Fall Creek; someone just called. They were having a cookout and he showed up in their backyard. He’s already had three bratwursts.”

On the Road Again

Barney’s most famous disappearance would become a true media event. It never quite rose to Jimmy Hoffa proportions, but in local lore it was pretty close.

One morning I was upstairs in my home office working on a TV segment when it dawned on me that I had not seen Barney for almost an hour. Not seeing him for that long was either a very good sign or a very bad sign. If he was asleep, the world was a safer place. If he was ambulatory, trouble was in the next room, or had been ... or around the corner, or down the block, or who knew where.

I cased the entire house. No dog, and sure enough, the back screen door had a huge hole in it where Barney had ripped the wood partition to shreds. Yes, he had gotten out, had been out for up to an hour. This was not the kind of head start you want to give a beagle. I felt like the sheriff in High Noon. It was going to be tough to find a posse. No one in my house was going to sign up. I spent the rest of the day scouring the neighborhood alone.

I searched for him for an entire week. I placed signs within a three-mile radius of my neighborhood. The $100 reward generated a modicum of interest—not quite like the mug shots in the post office, but in both cases the culprits were slippery and on the run. Whenever I got a call suggesting he had been spotted, I’d head in that direction with a photo and a glimmer of hope. Nothing. Did people not know the difference between a beagle and a basset hound? Or did they think I didn’t?

Many of the calls were about a beagle stray that lived downtown. I knew this was not Barney, but the little guy was quite a story himself. He had been living on the streets for several years, frequenting the back doors of local eateries. He was a survivor, a testimony to how a hound can make it on his own. Maybe Barney was rehearsing for his job.

My search did bring me into several, shall we say, transitional neighborhoods. “Have you seen this dog?” I’d ask, flashing his photo to a group of young hoodlums.

“Is he in trouble? What did he do? Are you a cop? Did he escape?”

“Yes, he escaped, but he’s not a criminal. You guys are watching too much TV. I just want to find my dog.”

Every radio station in town was now asking its listeners to keep an eye out for a stray beagle. The term “stray beagle” is considered redundant by anyone who knows anything about dogs. Over the six days, the on-air pleas and my ad in the local paper resulted in more than fifty calls from people who had either found